Blundering LTA still squandering millions as tennis teeters from crisis to crisis

The culture of shocking waste and failure at the Lawn Tennis Association is laid bare today. An exclusive Mail on Sunday investigation can reveal that:

Only £13.4million of £65.3m spent by the LTA in 2010 went on 'developing and supporting talent', according to the LTA's own financial accounts;

The LTA cannot retain key staff because of disenchantment with the organisation and some departures have cost hundreds of thousands in pay-offs;

Chief executive Roger Draper's salary package of £400,000- a-year can be boosted with bonuses even as most British players flop at Wimbledon;

A huge year-on-year drop in the number of British people playing tennis indicates expensive schemes to 'grow the game' are a waste of resources.

Bonus: Draper gets pay boost even if Brits flop

'The LTA is a chaotic mess,' said an insider. 'Most sports' governing bodies would kill to get tens of millions of pounds per year gifted to them, like the LTA do. Lack of progress isn't just embarrassing - it's a scandal.'

The LTA spent £10.3m last year on 'business support' expenses, including 'online services for tennis stakeholders', and another £3.6m in fees to bring in just £7.6m of commercial income. Employees' salaries accounted for £11.4m, including chief executive Draper's four-year contract, which has two-and-a-half years to run.

The LTA also splashed out £16.4m on 'the ongoing development and evolution of a national competition structure', in other words, holding tournaments - and that does not include Wimbledon, which is put on by the All England Club. These costs totalled more than £40m of the LTA's overall outlay of £65.3m.

An unconfirmed and secret amount has been spent on pay-offs as respected, high-level executives and coaches have been sacked, forced to quit or resigned.

LTA commercial director Bruce Phillips will be next to leave when he departs imminently to set up his own consultancy. He will follow Steve Martens, the LTA performance director, who quit earlier this year for a desk job in Belgian football.

Come and gone: Coaches Gilbert and Annacone

A string of world-class coaches have come and gone, including Paul Annacone, Peter Lundgren, John Lloyd, Carl Maes and Brad Gilbert. The LTA are handed almost half of their annual income by the All England Club, who give them the profits from Wimbledon fortnight each year. In 2010, this was £31m. Handouts from Sport England contributed another £7.3m to LTA projects in 2010.

The rewards for the LTA's outlay at elite level remain pitiful. The only British player still in either of the singles by the first weekend of Wimbledon is, again, Andy Murray. Only last week Draper said: 'If you judge British tennis on the first day of Wimbledon, that's your choice. But I judge it on the number of people playing.' He added that commercial income and other measurements were also important.

Unfortunately for him, research for Sport England, published this week, actually showed a collapse in the numbers playing tennis for at least half-an-hour each week, with numbers down by 22 per cent, year on year, from 516,000 to 402,200. And the headline figures for the LTA's major commercial revenue streams are misleading. The fiveyear deal with Aegon, supposedly worth £25m or £5m a year, is worth substantially less in reality, perhaps as little as £2m a year. This is because of 'costs incurred in securing and servicing commercial partners', or in other words, fees for consultants, agents and hospitality, which totalled £3.6m last year.

David Felgate, a coach who knows the LTA from the inside and outside having been sacked as performance director by Draper in 2006, said: 'The LTA can do all kinds of things to try to improve the game but they'll ultimately be judged by the public by results at an elite level.

'I understand why the British public would be critical and ask why we're not producing players. And if Roger Draper has said he wants to be judged by the numbers of people playing, and the numbers are going down, that's unfortunate.'

An All England Club spokesman said it was not the club's business to dictate how the profits from the Championships are spent by the LTA. 'We run a tennis tournament. The LTA runs the game,' he said.

The club have been handing over the Wimbledon 'surplus' every year since 1934 as part of a partnership after the LTA helped fund the move to Church Road in 1922.

An LTA spokesman said: 'The LTA is a not-for-profit organisation, so all income raised is invested in British tennis. More than half goes into grass-roots tennis, and our priority is to focus on growing the sport by helping more people play the game.'